Country star John Michael Montgomery keeping it genuine

By John Benson | June 25, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

Hills and valleys are something country singer John Michael Montgomery knows all about.

After spending the '90s as one of country music’s bigger stars with hit songs “I Swear,” “Sold [The Grundy County Auction Incident],” “I Love the Way You Love Me,” “Be My Baby Tonight,” “If You’ve Got Love,” “I Can Love You Like That” and “The Little Girl,” the Kentucky native’s last decade has been a rough road filled with health and legal issues, not to mention a dwindling record industry business, which found his albums selling less.

Despite his travails, a funny thing has happened to Montgomery. Similar to a rap artist who gains street cred for his thug history, the chinks in the 44-year-old country singer’s armor have seemingly emboldened his fans to embrace the artist for being a regular guy dealing with the same problems they have.

“Hopefully, I come off genuine to the people out there and my fans because I am,” said Montgomery, calling from Pensacola, Fla. “I grew up living in trailer parks and old farm houses. I got my cars out of junkyards and parts out of junkyards. I worked hard, physical labor and played music on weekends and at night. That was one of the luxuries of my life, to sing and play guitar. Basically, I’ve never embraced fame. I’ve never really got caught up in being famous. To me, I love playing music, and the fame part just happened.

“And in the same respect, it’s a double-edged sword. Those chinks in the armor maybe made me more genuine, but the industry will take that stuff and try to beat you down. That’s happened to me a few times.”

This was the case in 2004 when after releasing his album “Letters From Home,” Montgomery found himself without a record deal for the first time in nearly 15 years. For the singer, this was a door-opening opportunity to do something he had been thinking about for years, which was to open his own independent record label.

Four years later, Montgomery released “Time Flies” on his new Stringtown Records. Ostensibly, the 11-track effort finds the multiplatinum artist paying homage to the music that made him a country music fan in the first place.

“I think on this album you see the influences I listened to growing up in the mid-SSRq70s all the way to the SSRq80s,” Montgomery said. “There are a lot of songs you can listen to and say, ‘That reminds me of that era.’ It’s just some of the melody lines and stuff. There’s a song on the new album called ‘All in a Day’ that kind of hits on what I call the old storytelling days of songs. And then a song like ‘Fly On’ has a kind of epic feel. Another track that I wrote, ‘Brothers Till the End,’ has that old country feeling.”

Taking fans down memory lane with his new album, along with his dozens of hits, is what Montgomery plans on doing with his upcoming return to Northeast Ohio on Saturday at Eastwood Mall’s “Mahoning Valley Rib Burn Off.” And then there’s also the food, which perhaps gives new meaning to the title of his 1993 radio song “Beer and Bones.”

“You can bet I’ll be trying some ribs out,” Montgomery laughed, “Yes siree, I’m not going to be coming to a rib festival and not have any ribs.”

John Michael Montgomery is scheduled to perform at 9 p.m. Saturday at the Mahoning Valley Rib Burn Off at Eastwood Mall in Niles. For more information, visit www.mahoningvalleyribburnoff.com.